Your Own Personal Irene Adler

“To Sherlock Holmes she is always the woman. I have seldom heard him mention he under any other name. In his eyes she eclipses and predominates the whole of her sex,” so sayeth John Watson. Yes, technically the words were authored by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, but that’s beside the point. The point being that there was one woman that cracked the code of Sherlock Holmes, and in the television series Sherlock he cracked her code as well. Or at least the passcode on her phone.

“A Scandal in Belgravia” was based on the story “A Scandal in Bohemia,” but it doesn’t take Sherlock Holmes to figure that one out. This is the story where we meet Irene Adler, the one woman to get the best of Sherlock Holmes. A woman that was at least his equal, if not his better.

At some point in each of our lives we meet our own personal Irene Adler, or Sherlock Holmes, as the case may be. If you haven’t you’re living your life wrong. Maybe you are looking in all the wrong places. Then again, you don’t go around looking for Irene Adler–she finds you.

Sometimes you get more than one. Or maybe you think you have found her only to let your guard down and that is when they slip in undetected. They can mess up your lives if you let them. Then again my life has always been a mess.

There was this one woman many years ago that I met by a quirk of fate. I don’t want to go into details because it is a long story and you had to be there. I have a friend, not exactly my Dr. Watson, but a friend none the less, who likes to tell this story. It’s not the only story he likes to tell that involves me. The other one really isn’t a story since I don’t see it as a big deal because it can be summed up in a sentence Beside that, it’s no big deal. According to my friend people seem to: A) like the story, and B) don’t believe him when he tells it. My answer to that is that I feel sorry for those people because they don’t get around much.

Anyway.

As I was saying before I interrupted myself, I met this woman and blah, blah, blah, I kind of fell for her. I never told anyone exactly how much because I am a guy and I don’t want people to know just how bad I had it.

Long story short, yes, it’s far too late for that, things didn’t work out. Obviously. Let’s just say there were faults on both sides, and no, that doesn’t make me feel any better.

For a while there I was in a bad way. I tried to hide it but I am far too transparent. One of the regrets that I had about the incident is that I met another woman whilst I was in the sad place. She seemed very nice, and I think her mom even liked me as well. I was so blinded by self pity that I never really noticed that she was giving me the “go ahead” sign. Part of me wonders what might have been, but I have never beaten myself up for not asking her out. A bit of me likes to think that is a sign of personal growth on my part. I still think about her from time to time. Oh well.

As I said, I never really talked about my feeling for this woman, so I internalized them. Then one day I started to write my feelings down. I kept writing and writing and never really solved anything, but that’s not the point. The point is that I was writing. Then I started writing about other stuff in my life, and pretty soon, I realized that I was keeping a diary. I wrote about the good times and the bad, mostly about the bad since that is when I am at my most creative. Sad but true.

I still keep a diary but I don’t write in it as much since I started this blog. I don’t know if that’s a good thing or not. I have felt a lot better about myself the past few months, and that’s something I guess.

However…

I will never tell the story about the time, some while after I started keeping a diary, that I met my own personal Irene Adler. I’m keeping that one all to myself.